Voters cramming for special election

Mac Killman isn't impressed by any of the candidates in the special mayoral election. He feels that he recently voted and he's not excited about having to choose a replacement for former mayor Bob Filner.
— Roxana Popescu

Mac Killman isn't impressed by any of the candidates in the special mayoral election. He feels that he recently voted and he's not excited about having to choose a replacement for former mayor Bob Filner.
— Roxana Popescu

With five days to go to Tuesday’s special mayoral election, two types of voters are emerging: the have’s and the have not’s. As in, those who have thought about the race, and those who have not.

Tens of thousands of people have already mailed in their ballots — 118,000 of them as of Wednesday out of 360,000 ballots sent out — and the Registrar of Voters is tentatively projecting 44 percent turnout.

John Dadian, a Republican strategist not working on any local mayoral campaign, said such a turnout would be high for a special election. “If it is anywhere close to this, that would show that people are engaged, people are very informed about the different issues,” he said.

That may be high for a special election, but it still means that more than half of San Diegans who could cast ballots will not. Even many of those have yet to vote said that for a mix of reasons, they’re just not very interested in this election.

Mail-in
66% (823)

At the polls
32% (400)

At the Registrar's Office
1% (17)

1240 total votes.

People have been getting campaign mailers for weeks, but some still can’t name any of the major candidates — Mike Aguirre, David Alvarez, Kevin Faulconer and Nathan Fletcher. According to Justin Laughridge, 32, a pastor who lives in Mira Mesa, the contenders are “a guy that was, oh, a city councilman” and “gosh, I can’t remember his name.”

Or as Cindi Mitchell, put it, “Nathan Fletcher, and I couldn’t tell you any of the other ones. Isn’t that something?” she said. She added that any mailer she gets goes straight to the trash.

And they couldn’t tell you when Election Day is.

“When’s the election? Isn’t it next week? Is it tomorrow? It’s not today. It’s next Tuesday?” asked Mitchell, 51, panicking as she loaded frozen taquitos into her shopping cart in a grocery store.

This race is shorter and sooner — one year, instead of four, since the last mayoral election. And it comes immediately after a stormy chapter in local politics — Filner’s sex scandal, which led him to resign in August.

Diana Maurer, a piano and flute teacher who lives in University City, is still experiencing Filner fatigue more than two months after he resigned.

“I haven’t had time to process what happened in August. I’m just catching up on that news,” Maurer said at a Starbucks near her house. “It’s embarrassing that I don’t even know who’s running for mayor now. I was so disgusted with what happened with the mayor that it was a big turn off.”

She said she always votes, and she is willing herself to care. “I need to get more interested,” she said.

Another factor is that there’s no presidency at stake to motivate people. Also, this time around, some people said they’re disillusioned with politics in general, particularly after the recent federal government shutdown.

In this abbreviated election season, there are 81 days between the day Filner left office and Nov. 19. If no candidate wins the majority, there will be a runoff between the top two.